


The Long, Long Way Home

by Satchelfoot



Category: The Thing from Another World (1951)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:14:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21845767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satchelfoot/pseuds/Satchelfoot
Summary: After their confrontation with the Thing, Captain Pat Hendry and his crew thought they were about to go home. It hasn't been quite that simple.
Relationships: Captain Patrick Hendry/Nikki Nicholson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The Long, Long Way Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [donutsweeper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/donutsweeper/gifts).



“Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”

And, to be fair, many world governments did promptly allocate some resources to watch the skies for invaders. But the U.S. appeared more interested in watching us. Captain Hendry’s superiors denied us permission to come home until they could develop multiple risk assessment models. We had, after all, been within feet of an alien plant man, one that had fully intended to harvest humans for its own nutrition. Who knew for sure what kinds of infectious spores or microbes it may have brought with it? Even with the thing, its ship, and the samples Doctor Carrington made with the alien hand all burned to ash, General Fogerty and the rest of the brass decided to quarantine us for the time being to see if we’d caught anything. And we felt just swell, of course, waiting to see if we’d get sick. Actually, some of us were pretty sure they were collectively punishing us for destroying the ship before it could be examined, but Pat had no patience for that kind of talk.

The higher-ups did, at the very least, take Carrington off our hands. He had suffered a concussion when the thing slammed him into a wall, and there was some concern about his health if he were to be left at the base with us. A team flew over in hazmat suits and took him away. He wanted Nikki to come with him and continue recording his insights about the creature, but both she and the military leadership vehemently turned him down. For all we know or care, he’s still sealed up in some medical bunker deep beneath the Alaskan tundra.

The hazmat team also brought us supplies to patch up the base’s walls and doors after the damage caused during our confrontation with the thing. We soon had the place looking like new with plenty of help from Scotty—and Nikki, who turned out to have had a father and three older brothers who enlisted her help in their carpentry and home improvement projects. 

“Gee, Nikki,” Bob said, admiring the expertly repaired north wall, “how come you never told anybody you were so good at this stuff?”

“Oh, little old me? A girl in her twenties trying to make a living as a secretary? Who would have wanted to know I was good at ‘men’s work’?”

Bob went over and had a chat with Pat, Mac, and Eddie. The next day, the four of them offered to teach Nikki basic firearms handling and self-defense training. She took them up on it.

Pat and Nikki spent a lot of their free time in Nikki’s room, and it was understood that no one was allowed to comment on that besides Eddie and Mac. Pat tried to ban them from saying anything too, but that had never worked even before they got to the base. We all figured Nikki would make an honest man out of him as soon as they got to the mainland and found a reverend.

Scotty kept on sending updates to the news service for a while, but after a while there wasn’t much new to report from day to day. He never stopped writing, though: he had an idea there might be a book somewhere in our cold adventure, and he was going to be the one to write it. Every day at breakfast he’d be sitting there with his coffee and his notepad, just writing down everything he heard and whatever else came to him. Eddie once cheered him up for a day with a wild story about chasing down an ornery turkey back on the farm.

* * *

“Say, Pat,” Bob asked the captain one day when we’d been stuck here for two weeks, “we gotta go outside and do something once in a while. None of these boys and girls are gonna last long cooped up in here all the time. You might want to schedule time each day for us to go out in groups to stretch our legs, maybe even figure a way to play some games.”

“What do you suggest, touch football?” But then Pat thought about it. “There’s a frozen lake just a few dozen yards away. We could jigger a few pairs of ice skates together, maybe even set up a hockey team.”

“I think you’re right, captain.”

“I know you do, Bob.”

Unfortunately, the first day a group of us went out on the ice with some cobbled-together hockey sticks and a tin-can puck, we found a little surprise: another thing, smaller than the first one but definitely of the same species. Either it had been blown clean from the explosion of the ship we accidentally destroyed, or it was a whole other creature from a whole other ship. This time we didn't carve it out and bring it inside—no reason to risk thawing it out and going through the same disaster all over again. We planted bright orange emergency flags around the site and solemnly pledged never to go near it again without some serious ordnance. Pat thought he might have seen the thing move under the ice. He was probably imagining things.

* * *

After we found the new creature, Pat wouldn't let us leave the base for any type of recreation—routine maintenance and reconnaissance excursions only. But we had to do _something_ for R&R, or else we all knew we'd go batty. The science team used some beakers, funnels, dishes, and other objects from the lab and the galley to build a miniature golf course, and we had a rec area with plenty of jump rope and some cobbled-together punching bags. Eddie made slow progress teaching the sled dogs how to shake hands and fetch. Most importantly, as it turned out, Mac came up with the idea of performing our own adventure serials: not quite stage plays, not quite radio dramas, but owing a lot to both. Scotty, of course, jumped at the chance to write something besides his uneventful news updates and his saga of the mission. We had performances three times a week, holding our handwritten scripts and declaiming our lines as convincingly as we could manage (or sometimes just ad-libbing for laughs—not all of us could actually perform, especially not Barnes, but most of us could at least tell a joke). We started out with stories based on our favorite shows— _The Shadow_ , Sherlock Holmes, Nick and Nora Charles (played by Pat and Nikki—yes, even the captain got in on it and made for a really good drunk Nick). Once we'd gotten comfortable writing characters we already knew, we gradually started making up original stories with characters that sometimes closely resembled some of us on the base or our friends back home. We also started trying to outdo each other with cliffhanger endings. One Friday night, Nikki made us play out a script that ended with one of her most popular characters, master spy/chef Susan Flée, about to be boiled in an enormous bread pudding, while her sidekick, Johnny Cakes, appeared in danger of being skewered with a sharpened holly branch. Rather than wait until Monday night to learn how the perilous situation was resolved, we tried to buffalo Nikki into telling us how they'd get to safety. It did not work, only partly because she literally hadn't written the next script yet. We spent all weekend complaining about it, which was the point: any time we spent concerning ourselves with made-up predicaments meant less time brooding over our real uncertainty and isolation. In fact, the one hard-and-fast rule of our storytelling, never stated but always followed, was that there would be _no_ science fiction stories, at least not the kind with aliens. (We did attempt a _Superman_ show once, but even that was way too close to home.)

People back home thought very highly of us, which helped a great deal. Not that any civilians were allowed to communicate with us directly, but Tex, who seldom left the radio room, could pick up a few news bulletins here and there about stateside goodwill toward us and the sheer volume of socks and apple pies that were being prepared for the day of our return. Whole legends were being told about the mission, based very loosely on Scotty’s factual reports. Tex shared a few of the more outlandish stories with us. There were ten aliens, not just the one; they were literally gigantic root vegetables with arms and teeth (Scotty lived to regret including his “intellectual carrot” gag in one of his news stories). There was one common thread to all this hogwash: we were the heroes who saved the whole planet from an alien invasion. But the brass remained terrified that we might all be carrying some deadly virus from Mars, even after months passed and none of us got sick.

And so we kept on living here, our cobbled-together family on our patched-up base, from freezing day to frozen night, most of us starting to let our beards grow, just waiting for word any day now that the order had been given and Truman was ready to bring us home. Or for our newly discovered alien friend to break out of its ice block and come say hello, whichever came first. Either way, we were ready.


End file.
